NEW DELHI: In a registration reform that will be implemented countrywide, Indian election officials have given voters in Bihar state only a few weeks to prove their citizenship, needing documentation that few people have, which has raised concerns about disenfranchisement.
Ahead of the approaching elections in the eastern state, the Election Commission of India (ECI) declared in June that the voter records would be revised.
The exercise will thereafter be repeated throughout the 1.4 billion-person country, it claimed.
The ECI claims that preventing the “inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants” was one of the reasons for the “intensive revision”.
Members of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have long maintained that a significant number of undocumented Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, India’s neighbor, have illegally registered to vote in India.